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The article discusses how countries such as India and China have shown they can move beyond western imitation to homegrown innovation in certain fields, such as telecommunications and information technology. The same is increasingly true of biotechnology, argues a report just published in Nature Biotechnology by a group at the University of Toronto. The study looks at the state of medical biotechnology in six developing countries--Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India and South Africa--and one recently industrialised one, South Korea, to understand what it takes to build a healthy biotech sector. Many of the countries studied, which began investing in biotech in the 1980s, are starting to see the fruits of their labour. The number of scientific papers on health biotechnology published by researchers in Brazil and Cuba, for example, more than tripled between 1991 and 2002. Much of the biotech industry in the developing world is based on copying western innovation. But such generic manufacturing can be a springboard to more innovative activities. India's pharmaceutical firms are playing an important role in the global fight against AIDS by selling generic versions of anti-retroviral drugs at a fraction of the price charged by their western inventors in the rich world. There are plenty of other hurdles that the countries studied in the report need to tackle before their biotech blossoms fully. Brazil needs better links between academia and industry. Egypt's budding biotechnologists are short of cash from both government and private sources. India's regulatory system is slowing down product development. South Africa needs to do more to reverse its brain drain, and train more researchers to boost their ranks.